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1994-12-12 - Re: Clarification of my remarks about Netscape

Header Data

From: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Message Hash: c5fce2a40d98edc47271c6addeb513fb85dceeab5f4693f5b72479e5935fcd35
Message ID: <199412122229.OAA05451@jobe.shell.portal.com>
Reply To: <9412122118.AA11047@snark.imsi.com>
UTC Datetime: 1994-12-12 22:30:12 UTC
Raw Date: Mon, 12 Dec 94 14:30:12 PST

Raw message

From: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 94 14:30:12 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Clarification of my remarks about Netscape
In-Reply-To: <9412122118.AA11047@snark.imsi.com>
Message-ID: <199412122229.OAA05451@jobe.shell.portal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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"Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com> writes:

>HTTP, like SMTP, is only a transport for underlying documents. The
>underlying documents are the things people wish to secure, not the
>transport layer.  By securing only the transport, you make it possible
>for people to get pages that are forged, although they can be sure of
>what machine delivered them (which isn't significant). Your system is,
>for instance, useless in a proxy HTTP daemon environment.

I was going to say that an SSL-aware proxy daemon could play "man in
the middle" and pass through the SSL handshaking messages which occur
at connection time, so that the user client could authenticate the
remote server, then communicate using a key shared with that server but
which the proxy would not know.

But that won't work with SSL, I guess.  The SSL handshaking goes on
before any message data has been exchanged; in particular, before the
URL is sent to the proxy to tell it what server to connect to.  (Hiding
URL's is one of the features of SSL.) So in fact with SSL the only
authentication possible is between proxy and user, and then between
proxy and remote server.  There doesn't seem to be a place in the
protocol where the user could authenticate the remote server and create
a key which would not be known to the proxy.  This does seem to be a
deficiency.

Hal

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